Dell enhances big data and analytics portfolio

Dell has announced a series of new big data and analytics solutions and services designed to help companies quickly and securely turn data into insights for better, faster decision-making. 

These include a new release of Dell’s advanced analytics software platform and new analytics-as-a-service offerings for multiple industry verticals such as banking, healthcare and insurance. Together, these new offerings and capabilities enable companies to embed analytics across their core processes and disseminate analytics expertise across the organisation to drive better business outcomes. 

The Dell Global Technology Adoption Index 2015 (GTAI 2015) revealed that those organisations robustly using big data show 50% higher growth rates than organisations that aren’t*. However, the study also found that 44% of organisations still do not understand how to extract value from their data*. With the latest enhancements to its big data and analytics portfolio, Dell is helping customers overcome that uncertainty and invest wisely in data technologies. 

The launch of Statistica 13, the latest release of the company’s advanced analytics software platform, helps simplify and improve the process by which organisations deploy predictive models directly to data sources inside the firewall, in the cloud, and in partner ecosystems. An easy-to-use solution that requires no coding and integrates seamlessly with open source R, Dell Statistica delivers a full range of data blending, data discovery, and advanced and predictive analytics tools. 

Enhancements and new capabilities in Statistica 13 include: 

 A completely revamped and modernised GUI for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal 

 Deeper integration with the recently added Statistica Interactive Visualization and Dashboard engine for more effective communication to data consumers 

 Tighter integration with open source R for easier sharing and control of R scripts 

 A new stepwise model tool that progressively recommends optimum models for users 

 New Native Distributed Analytics (NDA) capabilities that allow users to work more efficiently with large and growing data sets. 

NDA functionality pushes predictive algorithm model-building and scoring functionality directly into the data source. This eliminates the time-consuming and data-limiting process of pulling data to an intermediate server or desktop, allowing all analytic processing to occur directly in the database and enabling organisations to leverage the power of Hadoop clusters, database appliances and other high-performance platforms. Statistica 13 will initially feature NDA capability for Microsoft SQL Server databases, with additional databases to be added in subsequent releases. 

Dell Services is expanding its analytics-as-a-service offerings with industry-specific services that help customers unearth insights, predict business outcomes, and improve the accuracy and efficiency of critical business processes. For example, new BPO services help embed analytics across an organisation’s core processes and disseminate analytics expertise to give scalability to data-based decision making. The new services include: 

 Fraud, waste and abuse management: Helps organisations identify cases of medical identity theft, unnecessary diagnostic services or medically unnecessary services and incorrect billing 

 Denial likelihood scoring and predictive analytics: Helps organisations proactively identify which claims are most likely to be denied, and provide at-a-glance activity data on each account, detailed monitoring and follow-up, in the process helping eliminate up to 40% of low- or no-value followup work 

 Churn management/customer retention services: Helps organisations leverage predictive churn modelling – the processing and correlation of new social data sources with traditional data sources – to identify customers they are at risk of losing, and proactively take preventative measures. 

In addition, the Dell Services team has introduced Dell Service Desk Analytics and Dell ModelHealth (DMH) Tracker. 

 Dell Service Desk Analytics transforms IT service desk management by enabling predictive error management and automation. It creates early warning alerts and text analytics to improve the end-user experience and reduce business disruption. 

 Dell ModelHealth Tracker helps customers track and monitor the effectiveness of their various scorecard or predictive analytics models. Particularly in industries with compliance requirements, including banking and insurance, companies use scorecards or other predictive models to predict critical outcomes, such as a customer’s creditworthiness or the likelihood of an insurance claim being fraudulent. DMH plugs into multiple data sources to track, archive and manage these models, and more importantly, monitor them for effectiveness and compliance. 

These new offerings join the more than 50 solutions from Dell Services in the area of advanced analytics, including healthcare analytics offerings focused on critical issues like population health, patient readmission, and health risk stratification; financial analytics offerings focused on online transactions and fraud detection; and insurance-focused offerings centered on reducing customer churn via analytics embedded within Lifesys, Dell’s platform for insurance claims processing. 

In addition to software and services, Dell has a history of offering engineered solutions and reference architectures that speed deployment times and time to value. These solutions are tested and validated to relieve customer pain points associated with deployment of effective data management techniques. Most recently, Dell announced its 15th reference architecture in collaboration with Cloudera, this time also including Syncsort DMX-h software. The Dell | Cloudera | Syncsort Data Warehouse Optimization – ETL Offload Reference Architecture streamlines the planning, design, construction and deployment process of transforming data into a ready state for analysis, also known as the extract, transform and load (ETL) process, using the Hadoop data platform. The reference architecture offers customers cost savings, faster time-to-value and quicker access to insights than an open-source, do-it-yourself. 

In addition, Dell’s ProDeploy Enterprise Suite offers customers a complete suite of deployment services and professional certifications designed to simplify deployments and help customers rapidly adopt new technology with confidence. 

John Thompson, GM, advanced analytics, Dell Software said: “In the modern data economy, the ability to gain predictive insight from all data is critical to building an agile, connected and thriving data-driven enterprise. Whether the data comes from real-time sensors from an IoT environment, or a big data platform designed for analytics on massive amounts of disparate data, the new offerings from Dell enable detailed levels of insight and action. With the new capabilities and enhancements specifically delivered in Statistica 13, Dell is making it possible for organisations of all sizes to deploy predictive analytics across the enterprise and beyond in a smart, simple and cost-effective manner, ultimately empowering them to better understand customers, optimize business processes, and create new products and services.” 

Prasad Thrikutam, President and global head of applications, Dell Services added: “More than ever, our customers are looking for ways to make sense of the enormous amount of information they collect, so that they can focus on their core business. With the launch of our analytics-enabled BPO services, and our analytics-as-a-service offerings for industry verticals such as banking, healthcare and insurance, we are able to provide actionable insights customers can use to grow their businesses, enhance their customers’ experience, and gain operational efficiencies.” 

Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst, ESG commented, “ESG’s research continues to show that companies of all sizes and across all verticals are looking to data for answers to their critical business questions. Getting those answers not only requires modern advanced analytics tooling, but also a full range of supporting capabilities, including data integration and data and database management, as well as the servers, storage, and ready-to-go appliances that provide the engine. Dell has not only put together an increasingly comprehensive portfolio that delivers those critical capabilities, but has continued to build a complementary ecosystem of strategic partners, supporting vendors, and professional services that enables it to help customers wherever they are in their big data and analytics journey.”

*Dell Global Technology Adoption Index, October 2015